Churchwardens are very long on account of stems that reach nine inches in length or more. The smoke must travel this great distance, and so it has more time and surface area in which to cool, resulting in what many consider to be a more pleasurable smoke. Churchwardens are notoriously inconvenient to carry around, and their small bowls only allow for a brief smoke.
Less common are stems made of reeds, bamboo, or hollowed-out pieces of wood. While many smokers enjoy smoking large-bowled briar pipes that can hold half an hour’s worth or more of their favorite tobacco, others don’t have time to sit in quiet contemplation for long periods of time. For the ten-minute smoker, we think that pipes with a much smaller bowl are a better tobacco pipe choice. While you could just smoke a pipe with a large bowl and leave it to go out, the taste of the tobacco when you relight the bowl may not be to your liking. For this reason, we suggest taking a look at meerschaum pipes and corncob pipes with small bowls if you prefer short smokes to longer ones.
They consist of a downward curve that ends with an upcurve where the bowl sits. Beneath the bowl is an air chamber which serves to cool, dry, and mellow the smoke. These typically do not have an air chamber and are so named only because of their external shape. The Prince was originally fashioned for Prince Albert who would later ascend to the British throne as King Edward VII. An English dandy if ever there was one, the prince demanded elegance not offered by any shape in existence at the time. Pipe maker Emil Loewe, founder of London’s Loewe and Co., designed the shape for Prince Albert, and in doing so created an instant classic.
Those even passingly familiar with bourbon have heard of Pappy Van Winkle. In the Scotch whisky world, Brora, Rosebank, and other closed distilleries have an intense following for liquor that is getting older and rarer every year. Cigar connoisseurs chase after vintage Cubans, Opus Xs, and Padron Millenniums.
The slogan, “A clever chap only smokes the original Dr. Perl,” is a German re-incarnation of the better known brand’s catchphrase. That nearly all pipes made in Germany today are influenced by the 9mm filter tradition. I dropped it due to lack of training, until my father who was also a pipe smoker told me the “secrets” after I turned 21. Kept the habit on and on for ten years, and then quit tobacco altogether. Aware that it is an offensive habit, I try to keep on the low side of one pipe a week but sometimes I binge. Also, according to Alfred Dunhill, Africans had a long tradition of pipe smoking asserting that by 1884, the King of the Baluka tribe of the Congo had established a hemp-smoking cult in place of fetish worship.
A well done Egg (pun intended) can be regarded as art, and surely countless have made their way onto the shelves of high-end pipe collectors. The Egg’s bowl is usually about the size of, what else, a large hen’s egg, and is most often seen canted forward a few degrees. The transition between bowl and shank is arguably the most graceful to be found on any of the standard pipe shapes. Made famous by the Danish pipe makers, a Danish made Egg usually features a long slightly bent shank which gradually flares until it reaches the stem. Now produced by pipe makers worldwide, Eggs remain very popular among pipe Enthusiasts today, and can Filling cut tobacco be found smooth, sandblasted, and rusticated.
Panels on the bowl must be even in number and symmetrically positioned, though paneled pipes with six or eight Filling cut tobacco sides may have panels of varying widths. This helps differentiate a paneled pipe from a Freehand, which may have one or more panels placed at any desired interval. The original Panel was a Billiard with four paneled walls, but the feature has spread to other shapes as mentioned. A paneled Billiard with a square shank is also referred to as a Foursquare. We can talk about the evolution of shape, and comment on the influences of this pipe maker and that, but the shape of the Freehand is entirely dependent on the hand of its individual maker.
The Author is usually seen as a smooth pipe and it lends itself quite nicely to a lighter stain color or even a natural finish, simply buffed to a shine with no stain at all. The origin of the Author name quite possibly comes from the ease and comfort with which it can be clenched in the teeth, whilst hunched over, penning furiously a literary masterpiece. Nicotine and tobacco-free ayurvedic cigarettes consisting of herbal ingredients that satisfy the urge for nocitine can help you quit smoking. We have antler pipes, brass pipes, totem pipes and pipestone pipes; all are completely functional. However, if it becomes too thick, it may expand faster than the bowl of the pipe itself when heated, cracking the bowl.
Bo is one of the few pipe makers in the history of the craft that has been credited directly with creating not one, but two entirely new shapes. Finding a suitable block for the carving of an Elephant’s Foot is a task in and of itself. Likewise straight grain should radiate from the end of the shank toward the back of the pipe, which like the front should also have an ample endowment of birdseye grain. An Elephant’s Foot should almost always be entirely smooth, though partial sandblasting has sometimes been executed successfully. The bowl of the Cutty is heavily canted forward, which helps differentiate it from other long-shanked pipes like the Canadian. The Cutty may sometimes display a very unique stem, which is slim, slender, and round (almost like a straw).
The bowl of the Calabash pipe is removable, held in place by a tension fit, or by “unscrewing” it from a threaded seat at the head of the pipe (a modern improvement). Historically the bowls were crafted in meerschaum, but are now also made from briar, ivory, or less commonly, boxwood or other suitable hardwoods. When the bowl of the Calabash is removed, one can see the cavernous interior chamber of the pipe, which allows for the smoke to become quite cool and dry before it is drawn into the mouth of the smoker. Calabashes may vary in overall size, but are easily distinguishable from other pipe shapes. The Calabash is typified by a very dramatic bend in the body of the pipe, nearly assuming the shape of a “U”, and has a drastic but gradual and uninterrupted taper from bowl to stem. The shank of the briar iteration cannot, for mechanical reasons, match the drastic bend of its gourd counterpart, but the spirit of the shape is usually carried through.